This book is an expression of concern. It arises from an experientially based anxiety about the use and abuse of social science research in informing policy in relation to issues of equity, respect and anti-discriminatory policy in multiethnic societies. The foundational basis for this concern does not rest in one institutional location or with one category of actors. Inevitably, at one level, it does address the motivations, institutional locations and actions of individuals, but the core issue to be addressed in this text is in essence the nature of the relationships between categories of actors within the contemporary dynamics of the multiethnic United Kingdom, and elsewhere. The focus of the argument and the majority of the concrete examples are based in the UK, but the scenario sketched here has a much wider relevance. The cumulative story that emerges from the chapters that follow is one of a significant dysfunctional tension between university-based social scientists, research funders and those who make use of the resultant policy-relevant research. More importantly it will be argued that the key elements of this critical dynamic are known to the actors involved, but that it has not been in their interest to explicitly name the malaise and address its sources and routine reproduction in their interdependent professional practice. There is a collusive denial of the inherent flaws in the current relationships, and of the damaging consequences of contemporary politics and ideologies on their shared endeavours to promote equity and civility within multiethnic societies.

Political context

Of course one key issue is the framing political environment within which this research and policy milieu operates. The assumption that in contemporary Britain there exists a consensual commitment to the promotion of an equitable and congenial civility across the multiethnic demography on this nation state is far from being substantiated in reality. At a very basic level, many people are resistant to acknowledging the veracity of the fact that the UK is already a de facto multiethnic society, with a demography that non-negotiably guarantees the sustained reproduction of ethnic difference among our citizenry (see Dorling and Thomas, 2004). The reality of ethnic diversity is paralleled by the growth of what Fekete (2009) has called ‘xenoracism’.